High Maintenance's Season Finale Brings With It the End of a Relationship

It's hard to love people. For one thing, people make it difficult to love them, by being selfish, bad at communicating, moody, destructive, overeager, needy, unkind, careless, and/or evasive. That's basically true of anyone at some point, even the ones who are "easy to love." But also every love, even when it's easy, comes with loss or some other kind of sacrifice that hurts, and adjustment to someone leaving (or worse) is a horrible process that every human being has to go through at least a few times. As we mourn, we fall into patterns, and we fall hard. Obsessions can be comforts and also a form of sickness. Attachment can be very hard to moderate.

If all of that as the underlying subject of the last episode of High Maintenance's first season sounds heavy, well—it is. But it's also, as usual, to the creators' credit that the intense events at the episode's core (death, grief, dealing with exes, being robbed) are dealt with humorously and generously, with room for weirdness, judgment, and ambiguity that keeps things from being too one-sided. Everybody hurts, more or less. Just be thankful you're okay.

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The character from the web series we get to revisit in "Ex" is Patrick (played with so much love by Michael Cyril Creighton), the agoraphobic man who lived with his sick mother in a cramped Manhattan apartment. Patrick is obsessed with Helen Hunt (there are portraits of her all over the walls, painted by various artists including one of the show's producers, Russell Gregory), and he's also obsessed with The Guy; he orders weed with no intention to smoke it, just to have a brief interaction that fuels his uncomfortable crush. Patrick treated those interactions like they were dates—he would dress up, comb his hair neatly, and prepare treats for The Guy to snack on. That episode of the web series always made me sad and uneasy, even as I knew that must be something that happens all the time, on smaller and larger scales. It's very easy to live your life in New York and not talk to anyone but delivery people for days. If you feel as much and as deeply as Patrick, you're bound to catch feelings for one of them.

In the beginning of "Ex," we quietly learn that Patrick's mom has passed away, and he is in a serious depression, watching As Good As It Gets in tears, consuming can after can of La Croix, and making complicated wreaths for his door out of trash that he's made beautiful. He spends his time, in other words, doing what he used to do when she was alive, but it's all different in a way he'd rather it not be. When The Guy visits, Patrick tells him that his mother is dead and asks (which is kind of a big step for him, you can tell) if they can smoke together.

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The Guy obliges, and when it becomes clear that Patrick doesn't know how to smoke. The Guy makes a gravity bong for the two of them. Not that I would know from personal experience, but here's something weirdly invasive about a gravity bong. It can be really hard to smoke without smoking too much, and that's what Patrick does. He gets very high, giggling and trailing off almost like a teenager, and The Guy decides that's his cue to leave. Before he leaves though, he offers that it's really nice out, and Patrick should take a walk. And like marijuana has done for many people with psychological blocks and fears, being high allows Patrick to finally leave the apartment, and it is terrifying and wonderful.

Brief sidebar: the trope of someone walking around the big city while on drugs is a great one, and I should have expected that this show would do it well. While a jazzy song that could have been left out of Tootsie plays, we get to see Patrick eat some pizza, dodge a crazy person on the street, browse the wares of a sex shop, make awkward eye contact with people who don't know he's high, and buy a shit ton of La Croix like it was rare treasure.

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On his way home with his La Croix, he trips over his cart (these are affectionately known to every human person in New York as old lady carts) and bangs up his face and leg. A psychic named Pam (the angelic Justin Vivian Bond) takes him in off the street and cleans him up. The brief flash of maternal affection ("You should try some Argan oil!" Pam suggests for his dry scalp) makes Patrick cry, and Pam diffuses any tension between strangers by recommending the Marie Kondo book that everyone raves about, without even knowing how helpful that would be for someone who hoards like Patrick. He stops collecting La Croix cans. He throws stuff he doesn't need away. And we see him try his best to figure out if the weed he has stockpiled sparks any joy. Like any symbol of romantic frustration, it doesn't. The next time The Guy visits, Patrick breaks things off with him, and the conversation is a remarkable reminder that dialogue in this show is not just good, it's all too realistic.

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If you're going to assign a character arc to The Guy in this season—and that's sort of what "Ex" does, as we move from Patrick's story to a Guy-centric plotline—you could say that he has had to learn, or rather learn over and over again, what function he really serves in other people's lives. He lends a non-judgmental ear that gets him into wacky or dangerous situations; he avoids getting too close with some customers and forgets to do that with others. When he gets a text from someone who claims to know his friend/customer Chad (charismatic softboy Chad, who is always fucking things up for people), he accepts the sale without thinking it through, and he gets robbed in the vestibule of the apartment building. And of course, this makes him think about things as they are: what he's doing, why he's doing it, and what he needs to do differently to avoid feelings of sadness or guilt or powerlessness.

The problem is he's doing all this thinking in someone else's space. We learn in the last part of "Ex" that The Guy lives down the hall from his ex Jules and her girlfriend Gwen. Jules is out of town on business, and Gwen has the whole place to herself for one night. What she wants to do with that alone time is take a bath, drink some wine, eat noodles in her pajamas, do a face mask and some tarot. I have maybe never related to a High Maintenance character more. But because The Guy is locked out of his apartment, he needs the spare keys, and Jules has KonMaried the hell out of her apartment to the point where Gwen cannot find them. (That is my problem with that book in a nutshell.)

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In a rare display of not being able to read the room, The Guy crashes Gwen's night in, and she's sick of his shit, trying to ignore him and focus on her adult coloring book. Because this would not be an episode of this show without some phone-based hijinks, she types a quick text about wanting to strangle him and sends it to him instead of her friend, which causes him to leave sheepishly. When she realizes her mistake, they have a low-key tearful conversation in the hallway about needing time to take up all the space in a room. The episode ends with The Guy walking off to the bar to meet up with Beth and realizing his door was unlocked the whole time.

It's a good ending to the show's first season. It shows how difficult it is to sustain patterns and assumptions; it shows how important it is to claim your space. It shows how we inhabit our corners without doing what we fear the most. And it shows how the people who live in this loosely connected social sphere both need and don't need one another. For Patrick to finally leave his apartment, he needed to go through one of the hardest separations people go through. For The Guy to be rocked out of passivity, he needed to lose what he was selling. While it's doubtful the show will involve The Guy giving up his job, it's satisfying to see him question what he's doing and whether he doing it the right way. Asking if your commitments are still serving you isn't a disaster—it's often just what you need to recommit.

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